In this post I will be starting
to lay our what my idea of the morality of God is. Many theists, such as
William Lane Craig, claim that God is the grounding of objective morality.
Either that, or that God is the even less defensible basis of an absolute moral
code. I will look at both of these issues.

Let me lay out some groundwork
about morality. One popular secular value system for morality is called
consequentialism. This broadly states that the moral value of an act is derived
from the consequences which the act brings about rather than the intrinsic
moral value of the act itself.

Immanuel Kant, on the other hand,
was a deontologist. Deontologists believe that the morality of an action is
intrinsic and is valued on how well it adheres to objective moral rules. One of the classic
criticisms to this position is known as the Inquiring Murderer thought
experiment and is as follows. If a murderer came to your house and asked you
where his prey was, and you knew, you would be obliged to tell the murderer and
thus facilitate the death since there is a moral worth in not lying.
Deontologists often claim that you cannot use people for a means to an end,
they are the end in themselves. Thus, in the trolley experiment, where changing
the tracks will cause the death of one person and not five, it is morally bad to change the track to save five, thus allowing the one to die since you would be using the death of one person to obtain the life of five others.You would be using the one person as a means to an end.

There are many arguments for and
against such ethics. Divine Command Theories and Absolute Morality are also examples
of deontological ethics. Kant called his rules <i>Categorical
Imperatives</i> and you can see how similar they are to religious
absolutist rules such as the 10 Commandments. In these cases, one would be obliged not to break the rules in in order to obtain the greater good because you are using the acts, people or other things as a means towards another end. For example, the poor chap who picked up sticks on a Sabbath broke the rule and was killed. The fact that he may have been getting sticks to feed and warm his starving family is irrelevant. Think the Inquiring Murderer. Greater goods are morally irrelevant in these codes.

Pragmatically (and we know this
from simulation experiments of the Trolley Experiment), most people act as
consequentialists. Myself, I adhere to utilitarianism – a form of
consequentialism that values moral good by the amount of happiness an action
brings about. This is a simplified definition of a very complex ethical outlook.

So why do I mention all of this?
Well, it gives a short introduction to moral philosophy which should illustrate
the double standards to which God and theists adhere. I wrote a piece
about this, created a video and more recently an essay. I will copy the original passage below:

When debating morality and ethics
with Christian theists, scorn is often poured on secular ethicists who adhere
to moral disciplines that are not grounded in God. Usually, these moral
approaches are consequentialist in nature. In other words, moral actions are
defined by the consequences they deliver as opposed to the intrinsic morality
of the action itself. The ends justify the means. As an example, such an
approach might well be utilitarianism. Though this appears in many guises (for
example, act and rule utilitarianism), it basically dictates that a good action
is one which derives the most ‘good’, or happiness, as a consequence.

Theists claim that good acts are
good intrinsically, and the basis for this goodness is the nature of God
himself. Now, I do not want to get into the vagaries of Divine Command Theories
but suffice it to say there are many good arguments against such positions.

What is important to understand,
however, is that God is not a moral absolutist; he is, at least extremely
often, a moral consequentialist. In other words, God does not (again, at least
very commonly) believe that actions are right or wrong, regardless of their
consequences or the contexts in which the actions take place, but derive their
rightness from their context or consequences.

The proof for this is
unbelievably commonplace. We could start with the sacrifice and death of Jesus.
But there are far more obvious acts (or omissions). Take Noah’s flood. The
death of all of humanity bar eight, the death of billions of animals and
ecosystems, would strike many as being ‘not good’. Many could argue that such
an action (enacted by God) is intrinsically bad. However, God nevertheless
enacted this destruction. Why? Because there was a greater good that would come
from it – there has to be or God cannot be labelled all-loving. The end
justifies the means. God is being a consequentialist.

Let’s look at God allowing the
2004 tsunami, allowing the Holocaust, the floods, volcanoes, fires, other
tsunamis and every single natural disaster since the beginning of time... In
fact, by God allowing every single bit of suffering, every single death, that
has ever happened to any human being or animal since the Big Bang (or Genesis
Creation) we can see that on every
single occasion God has been consequentialist. The consequences of every
single piece of suffering must (if God is all loving, powerful enough to have
it otherwise and knowledgeable enough to know how to have it otherwise)
outweigh the intrinsic ‘badness’ of the action.

So either God (or the theist)
believes that actions are not intrinsically good or bad, or the consequences of
the actions are more important than
the intrinsic value of the actions. Thus, even if intrinsic moral values exist
as well as consequentialism, it seems that consequentialism trumps intrinsic
moral value every time suffering is
allowed to happen.

Therefore, the next time you get
into a debate about morality with a theist and they try to denigrate secular
consequentialism, demand that they explain such a criticism in light of God’s
ubiquitous reliance on the virtue of consequentialism himself.

So what we have here, by all
accounts, is the notion that God himself is a consequentialist. In the next
post, I will look at the Old Testament declarations of moral absolutism and
show that these are internally contradicted within the texts of the Bible continuing to illustrate the confusing foundations of morality exhibited by God and his folks.

In summary, God’s morality is unclear,
contradictory and seemingly derived from values outside of himself.